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Metropolitan
Opera, New York / the production I saw was a live, in HD, screening at the Rave
Theater, Westchester,
California

Although most of the critics who I read
(Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times,
Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times,
and Anne Midgette of The Washington Post)
agreed that the Met's new production of Nixon
in China was excellent and long overdue, there was a sense between the
three that the plot of the work was static and that one character, in
particular, Henry Kissinger (sung by Richard Paul Fink) was a figure of parody
whereas the others were treated more seriously. In a piece by Max Frankel,
published in The New York Times a
couple of days before the live HD airing, the former editor of the Times—who was with Nixon in China and
won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the trip—squarely asked the question which
the other reviewers only intimated:

...Why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional
enterprise with contemporary characters and
scenes from an active memory bank? Why use actualities, or the
manufactured actualities of our television

screens and newspapers, to
fuel the drama?

The answer, he feels, is "obvious
but also treacherous," that the use of actual characters helps to
"overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses," drawing
new audiences into the theater. But, Frankel continues, it brings other dangers
with it:

The danger is that despite
the verisimilitudes of text, setting and costume, a viewer's grasp of
events may not match the fabric being woven onstage. What
the creators intend to be profundity may strike the knowing as
parody.

Most of the reviewers agreed that the composer, writer, and director did
give their figures a range of emotions, both serious and comic, and between
acts, Winston Lord (of National Security) assured us that much of the talk
between Nixon and Chairman Mao in the First Act was close to what actually was
said in their meeting; but all also felt that the opera did move to a kind of
parody in the Second Art performance of The
Red Detachment of Women, in which Fink, the singer-actor who played
Kissinger, also plays a lecherous, Simon Legree-like landowner who has stolen
away a young maiden. Fink sings:

She was so hot

I was hard-put

To
be polite.

When the first cut

—Come on you slut!—

Scored her brown skin

I
started in,

Man upon hen!

Some characterized this scene as surreal
and the last act as psychological, as if they were somehow different in tone
from the more historicized events in the First Act.

If nothing else, there was a sense that Nixon in China, without a narrative arc, was a bit of a rocky ride.
Certainly, at times, while always enjoying the shimmering glory of the music, I
too felt that way while watching it. Yet now that I've pondered it for while, I
believe I was mistaken, that, in fact, the opera is highly structured and
fairly coherent in its tone and presentation of characters.

First of all, John Adams and Peter Sellars are never going to present
something that works as a Verdi opera might. Although all may work with a
complex weaving of historical events, Verdi's sense of drama is highly embedded
in narrative, while Adams and team, postmodern in their approach, eschew what
we might call "story."

Nixon in China has
"events," but there are presented in a series of tableaux, not unlike
some medieval musical productions. Each character gets the chance to reveal his
or her selves. But what Alice Goodman, Adams and Sellars are interested in is
not so much the outer faces they present to the world, but what these figures
are thinking and imagining within. And I think they would have to admit that
every figure on their stage is, in one way or another, a bit unhinged; these
are, after all—with the exception perhaps of Pat Nixon—people desperate for
power. And all are on the edge of insanity.

Even before we meet any of the major characters, the people of China
speak in a strange manner that we comprehend is not quite rational thought, as
they sing from the text of "The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight
Points of Attention":

Prompt delivery
directly to authorities of all items

confiscated
from landlords.

Do not damage
crops.

Do not take a
single needle or piece of thread from the masses.

Pay for everything
you damage.

etc.

As they chant, "The people are the
heroes now," even if these "heroes" are highly manipulated and
controlled.

Out of the sky drops the Nixons' Spirit of 76, and no sooner does the
President descend the airstair, shaking the hand of Premier Chou En-lai, than
he begins inwardly calculating the great results of this journey as the filming
catches him just in time for the evening news broadcasts in the USA, he
hilariously singing out his fascination with his own acts: "News! News!
News!

News has a kind of mystery;

When
I shook hands with Chou En-lai

On
this bare field outside Peking

Just
now, the whole world was listening

James
Maddalena, who has now sung this role in hundreds of performances, is an
amazing actor, who brings off those jowl-shaking absurdities quite brilliantly.

Nixon's and Kissinger's meeting with Premier Chou (Russell Braun) and
Chairman Mao (Robert Brubaker) in the next scene is perhaps the most absurd of
the entire opera, as the two powerful leaders speak in a series of alternating
gnomic jokes, apothegms, and, in Nixon's case, simple American verbal blunders.
As Mao becomes more and more incomprehensible ("Founders come first / Then
profiteers") in sayings parroted by a wonderful trio of assistants, Nixon
attempts his linguistic twists spun from what he believes the Chairman might be
saying. It all reminds me, a bit, of the other Peter Seller's performance as
the totally innocent and ignorant Chance in the film Being There, where he spouts meaningless sentences interpreted by
others to be full of profound significance. Mao and Nixon, one a bit senile,
the other humorless and often depressed, hit it off beautifully in their
mindless chatter, while the more rational Kissinger proclaims to be unable to
understand anything, and the Premier sits silently in sufferance.

What
that meeting accomplished, an issue clearly of importance in this opera, is
questionable. But surely we can feel, and, in Adams' delicious scoring, we can hear the growing friendliness of all
figures as they swill down Mai-tai after Mai-tai with toast upon toast. Again,
non-drinker Kissinger misses out on all the glorious insanity of the evening.

In Act II we get a chance to see Pat Nixon at the edge. She begins the
morning, in fact, downing a couple of needed pills. Like Premier Chou she is in
sufferance, and, although excited by the whole trip, she is also exhausted and,
we feel, not at all comfortable. The most American of this opera's figures, she
flaunts a bright red coat. Flawlessly played by Janis Kelly, Pat comes off as
somewhat frail and slightly terrified being as she is rushed through a glass
factory (where the workers award her a green elephant) and classrooms in which
the students have clearly been told what to say and how to behave, before
stopping by the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill, where she sings her touching
and slightly pathetic paean to the world she loves:

This
is prophetic! I foresee

A time
will come when luxury

Dissolves
into the atmosphere

Like a
perfume, and everywhere

The
simple virtues root and branch

And
leaf and flower. And on that bench

There we’ll relax and taste the fruit

Of all
our actions. Why regret

Life
which is so much like a dream?

Yet the homespun images she spins out of
her sense of momentary joy—lit-up farm porches, families sitting around the
dinner table, church steeples, etc.—are right out of Norman Rockwell paintings
and is just as absurd of a vision as are her husband's darker mumblings.

That evening's presentation of The Red Detachment of Women ballet,
written by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife—as she so shrilly reminds us later—is
experienced by the now overwhelmed Nixons less as an objective performance—in
reality the evening ended with enthusiastic praise by the President and First
Lady—as from a psychological, inner viewpoint. It is clear that Nixon, as he
suggests several times in the opera, admired Kissinger's mind, but he also mocked
his ways and apparently disliked the man personally. Accordingly the Nixons
both conjure up the evil landowner in their tired travelers' minds, to be, or, least, to look like Kissinger.* Like many an innocent theater-goer, the
Nixons become so involved in the story of a poor girl who is saved and then
destroyed by refusing to obey Communist doctrine that they confuse drama with
reality, breaking into the action of the ballet itself to save and protect the
young dancer.

Mark Morris, using some aspects of the original choreography, nicely
stages his orderly squadrons of young military dancers against the chaos of
events. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the opera, and I am still
not sure whether or not it truly succeeds, but it is crucial to our witnessing
the truly mad person behind Chiang Ch'ing (Kathleen Kim)—who in real life may
have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and had, herself, erratic nerves
and severe hypochondiasis—as she proclaims in the noted aria, "I am the
wife of Mao Tse-tung," angrily declaring that all be determined by
"the book." After Mao's death, we should recall, Chiang Ch'ing
committed suicide.

After witnessing these six individuals'—Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung,
Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Chiang Ch'ing—mental dramas, we
can only breathlessly watch as they slip into sleep. Kissinger shacks up with
one of Mao's translators before disappearing into the bathroom. The Nixons
share their disappointments, the President for being misinterpreted by the
newspapers, Pat silently suffering, with tearful eyes, from her husband's
inattention and having herself to attend yet again to what may be his ritual
recounting of an attack he endured in World War II. Mao also finds relief in
the hands of one of his translators before threatening his wife for having made
political mistakes, until he falls with her into a lustful embrace upon their
bed. Chou En-lai, clearly already in pain from the bladder cancer which would
kill him 4 years later, awakens early to return to his never-ending work,
drawing a close to all the madness with the most profound question of the
opera: "Was there any point to any of it?" The "it" may
refer, obviously, to the Nixons' visit, but it also suggests another possibility
of meaning: "Was there any point to all their madness, to their desperate
struggles to hold onto any power they might have over others?" All ended
their lives in disgrace and shame, except for Pat; but even she almost
disappeared from the public eye after the death of her husband, suffering a
serious stroke the same year that Chou En-lai died.

In some respects, I now wonder, despite its occasional comic elements
and always lush sonority of sound, if this isn't one of the darkest of operas.
But then, aren't the young and the old—represented by the US and China—usually
at the heart of the tragic, Romeo and Lear?

Los
Angeles, February 19, 2011

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (March 2011).

_____

Coincidentally, in my 1990 "opera
for spoken voices," The Walls Come
True (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), I included Dr. Kissinger in
my "Twelve Tyrants Between Acts: Mundane Moments and Insane
Histories," based on the paranoia and ridiculous accusations he expressed
in his Years of Upheaval (Boston:
Little Brown, 1982) when, in 1973, he was in Hanoi attempting to negotiate the
Paris Accords.

Peter
Sellars (libretto, based on Old and New Testament Sources and texts by Dorothy
Day, Louis Erdrich, Primo Levi, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordon, Hildegard von
Binger, and Rubén Dario), John Adams (composer) The Gospel According to the Other Mary, conducted by Gustavo
Dudamel / the performance I saw was on Saturday, June 2, 2012

The new opera-oratorio by John Adams and
his often-time collaborator Peter Sellars, if nothing else—and there is a great
deal more to be said for this work—is a serious and mature contribution to
orchestral and vocal music of the 21st Century. Focusing this work on a woman,
Mary Magdalene, the "other" Mary (Jesus' mother and Mary the mother
of James being two further Biblical Marys), in legend from the town of Magdala,
but in this version is described as being, along with her sister Martha and
their brother Lazarus, from Bethany.

The
gospels mention her very few times, primarily in Luke and Mark; but her
importance is clear, particularly through the apocryphal texts which refer to
her several times. She is one of the strongest and most important women who was
close to Jesus, remaining with him beneaath the cross until his death and
accompanying his body to the sepulchre wherein he was buried. Most importantly,
however, are the biblical texts that describe Mary Magdalene as the one who
discovered that Christ had risen, reporting thenews to his doubting disciples. In connection with this role, particularly
from the 10th century on, she is referred to as the "apostle to the
apostles."

Adams' and Sellars' piece recounts some of this biblical history,
particularly Mary Magdalene's suffering at the feet of Jesus during the
Crucifixion and her later discovery of the missing body, Jesus, who she
mistakenly took to be a gardener, calling her by name, the event which ends the
work. But through the libretto's collage of texts, this piece takes the Mary
Magdalene our of biblical context and drops her into numerous Twentieth century
contexts, presenting the two sisters first as women who have been arrested and
jailed, later as women who run a "House of Hospitality" for homeless
girls, and in the Second Act as women picketing along with civil rights
activist and union leader César Chávez—a far different César from Caesar
Augustus whose call for a census brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem for their
child's birth.. This shuffling back and forth in time is an attempt, obviously,
by the librettist and composer to link the immediate lessons of Jesus with
those who carry his message forth into our own time. And in several ways their
condensation of time successfully presents these two important women in Jesus'
life in a role in which they embody Christ's teaching, while at the same time
emphasizing—particularly in Martha's complaint of being forced to serve alone
while her sister lies at the master's feet—the special role Mary Magdalene
played in Jesus' life.

Adams' music, particularly in the first act, as he follows these women's
lives and the resurrection of their brother Lazarus, is lush and beautiful, his
constantly shifting rhythms reflecting the pushes and pulls of the demands
these special followers put upon Jesus. The composer's brilliant concept of
carrying much of the narrative through the voices of three countertenors
(Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and Nathan Medley) allows the story to move
forward, while the central figures, Mary Magdalene (Kelly O'Connor), Martha
(Tamara Mumford), and the strong-voiced Russell Thomas as Lazarus sing of their
own psychological experiences and their personal relationships with Jesus.

From the beginning we come to understand Mary Magdalene as a woman of
special intensity, having evidently attempted suicide and isolated herself from
others after her brother's death—the injuries to her arm healed by the messiah—while
later showering her love upon Jesus with the herbs and ointments with which she
has bathed her hair and with which washes Jesus' feet. Far from the
hard-working and more sensible Martha, Mary is clearly a woman of passion, as
the women's chorus put it (in Spanish) "a body transfixed by the noonday
sun," which becomes a metaphor of her love for and her personal
relationship with Jesus. This Mary—without specifically being portrayed as a former
prostitute—is very much an embodiment of Jesus' teachings about love.

There are numerous powerful moments in the First Act, including the
prophet Isaiah-inspired "Howl ye," sung by Lazarus and the Chorus, the
passage in Spanish I just referred to ("En un diea de amor yo bajé hasta
la tierra"), the intense Resurrection of Lazarus ("Drop down, ye
heavens, from above"), again sung by the Chorus, Lazarus' own impassioned
outburst ("For the Grave cannot praise thee,"), Mary's "I wash
your ankles" and the Chorus's response ("Spiritus sanctus vivificans
vita"), and the absolutely splendiferous Last Supper, sung by Lazarus
("Tell me: how is this night / Different from all other nights?"),
apiece, ending the First Act, which I
almost hoped might never cease.

Unfortunately, not all of the passages that Sellars chose for his
collage are as excitingly poetical as those I mention, and, particularly in the
Second Act, when the biblical narrative begins to dominate, so too does the
music turn a bit turgid, occasionally reminding one of the numerous Hollywood
film epics of Jesus' life and crucifixion. Here the Countertenors and their
narrative-telling dominate, while the personal viewpoints of the work's three
major figures is diminished by the swelling of larger events, including Jesus'
own arrest and Mary's and Martha's agitated protests. Accordingly, the action
is described in a kind of secondhand manner that effects not only the libretto
but the music as well. Only with the Crucifixion, particularly in Scene 4, with
Mary's recounting of the falling rain on Jesus' body, and Lazarus'
interpretations of the dying Christ's words: "I want no shelter, deny /
the whole configuration" does the work again reach the heights of the
First Act. And both librettist and composter redeem this act with the stunning
introduction of a resurrection of nature itself: "It is spring. The tiny
frogs pull / their strange bodies out / of the suckholes," sung by both
the Chorus and Mary. The final graveside encounter between Mary and the
gardener who calls her name, is so marvelously understated that the audience
with whom I saw The Gospel According to
the Other Mary was not sure to applaud as Dudamel brought the orchestra to
a quiet cessation.

What I have said above, however, cannot to
do justice to instrumental variations of this piece which uses numerous
percussion instruments not usually to be found in modern-day orchestras, along
with the employment throughout of the cimbalom, creating the sound of an
instrument contemporaneous with the Biblical events. Some of the narrative
difficulties, moreover, may be solved

when the production is transformed from
a piece of the orchestra hall into a blend of opera and oratorio performance,
which is planned for the future. I cannot wait to rediscover this work in its
new form, but feel blessed to have experienced it in this early manifestation.